I know most of you who read this blog, and I’m pretty sure that the five-star beach resort is less likely to make it onto your list of imminent vacation destinations than a place like, say, Luang Prabang, Laos.
It’s an ancient Buddhist village, protected (if you can really call it that) by war and poverty from development and other escapements of modernity, and full of all the cultural richness all that crap I just said implies.
So today, it’s a World Heritage Site–and such a popular vacation destination that it has little in common with the rest of Laos any more. It barely even resembles what it used to be, folks there say.
As in, it’s not really…poor any more.
There’s a lot to be said about this, and the Times article does a good job of a half-dozen points that could each be their own piece. But here’s a dilemma worth thinking about, one that resonates in the part of the world I live in, and surely the grand places you all have seen that I haven’t:
“The paradox is that Unesco gives out the Heritage Site label partly to reduce poverty, but reducing poverty is reducing heritage,” Mr. Rampon [who runs the city’s cultural preservation office] said. “If you want to preserve heritage, you must keep poverty.”
What, my dear friends, do you make of this?
just let the Malians in Djenne (the world’s largest mud structure!! ) in on the secret…..cause they are still pretty damn poor!
Granted, no white people allowed inside the mosque…story goes that you (by “you” I mean white people. I take grand leaps here, bi jina) used to be allowed in, but then some Europeans (read: French) shot some ad campaign inside, with a women in a bikini.
Hence the Kibbutz on toubabs.
Yet, the other “major tourist” spot in Mali is Dogon country. Not a Heritage site, BUT does have loads and loads of white peeps going in for a hike, and to buy cultural artifacts, and to pay for ceremonial dances (think of paying for a village to put on a voodoo ceremony in Haiti….its THAT kind of exploitation). And this insane influx of money to an extremely impoverished area…which means people want to support tourism, and so keep selling artifacts, and putting on these dances that are normally secret society things done in the middle of night at specific times of the year…..the banalization of culture.
So the urge that your roomie had to go live in a more African way…on some level I get it, when the culture you get as a tourist isn’t the life that is lived in that place….where is the middle ground between Mzungu palace and mud huts? How to walk without patronization, presumption in places of poverty?
Keep fighting the good fight, Bi Jina. That’s all there is to do.